Something NOT to watch tonight: Tuesday 20 August

The Bourne Legacy (Gilroy, 2012)

Today’s news­let­ter takes a slightly dif­fer­ent approach as I see my dead­line fast approach­ing and my search for some­thing good that’s actu­ally avail­able is draw­ing a blank. (Apologies to read­er JS of Mt. Victoria for anoth­er fire­arm in the photo.)

Besides, this is one of my favour­ite pieces of writ­ing (from the Capital Times on this day in August 2012):

In The Bourne Legacy, Matt Damon’s amne­si­ac super-soldier Jason Bourne is a shad­owy fig­ure, loom­ing invis­ibly over a plot that for con­trac­tu­al reas­ons can’t accom­mod­ate him. It’s as if he’s in the sin bin – after a yel­low card for demand­ing dir­ect­or approv­al – watch­ing the clock tick down until he can take the field again.

The dir­ect­or that Damon objec­ted to is Tony Gilroy – co-writer of all the Bournes and writer-director of Michael Clayton – and next time someone should listen to Damon’s instincts. He said he wouldn’t do anoth­er Bourne without Paul Greengrass (dir­ect­or of the last two, Supremacy and Ultimatum) and the weird com­prom­ise con­cocted by Gilroy to keep the fran­chise alive will prob­ably only sat­is­fy the stu­dio and the Robert Ludlum estate. Bourne is on life sup­port but no more than that.

Refer a friend

The plot of The Bourne Legacy runs roughly par­al­lel with the last of the Damon films. As Bourne is attack­ing the sin­is­ter gov­ern­ment forces who turned him into a ruth­less killing machine, the state in turn is try­ing deper­ately to shut down the pro­gramme and des­troy the evid­ence. One of those bits of evid­ence is Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) who escapes an attempt on his life in Alaska and goes search­ing for the source of the drugs that made him so strong. His jour­ney – with the help of sci­ent­ist Rachel Weisz – is cross-cut with some of America’s finest act­ors sur­roun­ded by satel­lite imagery on big screens say­ing things like “How could that hap­pen?” and “I don’t know!”

Perennial second-banana Renner shows lead­ing man poten­tial for the first time but unlike Greengrass, Gilroy is no great shakes as a dir­ect­or of action so – com­bined with the pur­pose­less plot – the res­ult is the first tedi­ous Bourne movie – The Bored Legacy.

Also fea­tured in that 2012 column are some much bet­ter (but unavail­able) films: Richard Linklater’s Bernie and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s gor­geous I Wish, along with cos­tume drama Cheerful Weather for the Wedding and the demen­ted Nazis-on-the-Moon fantasy Iron Sky.

Where NOT to watch The Bourne Legacy

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Neon, Apple or Microsoft

Australia: Streaming on Binge, FoxtelNow or Paramount+

Canada: Streaming on Netflix, PrimeVideo or HollywoodSuite ON Demand

Ireland & UK: Streaming on SkyGo

USA: Streaming on Starz

Further listening

Here’s my latest chat with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights last Friday. We covered Ghostlight, the arrival of Ms. Information as a digit­al rent­al and my free-to-stream selec­tion was the clas­sic romantic com­edy His Girl Friday from 1939. That’s avail­able on the lib­rary stream­ers Beamafilm and Kanopy as well some high qual­ity but eth­ic­ally dodgy ver­sions on YouTube.